Naptime Confidential: A Popeye in the making?

Gotta be honest: Not a huge fan of Popeye but you do think spinach when his name is mentioned.

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you all are enjoying a wonderful day with your friends and family.

Tuesday: We hit the brakes on new foods after the egg allergy and other hive incidents. Though I think the reaction was understandable, we probably went a little overboard. This night, when we sit down to a dinner of grilled chicken and spinach, we realized, “A has never had spinach!” I’m not a huge fan of canned spinach (I put mustard on it to liven things up), and G won’t eat fresh spinach (raw or cooked) unless forced. But, pre-A, we would eat some kind of spinach once weekly just because it’s such a great food for you. I’m happy to report A loved the spinach (canned this time), greedily picking it up as soon as we could put down little pieces for her. What surprise favorites do your little ones have?

Wednesday: Third time will be the charm, right? This now marks the third time that we’ve eliminated formula in favor of whole milk. The first two times A broke out with an awful diaper rash that may have been coincidental to the transition to whole milk. But, without other theory to follow, we dialed back on the milk and then gradually reintroduced. This time, we went one ounce at a time (for an 8-ounce bottle: 7 ounces formula to 1 ounce milk for a week then 6-to-2, etc.) We have now returned to full-strength milk. Next up: Ditching the bottle. How did you handle the bottle-to-cup transition? Did you keep one bottle a day? If so, which one?

Friday: I was stunned by a note on the room to A’s class at daycare that asked parents to participate in parent-teacher conferences. Really? This is our first go-round, which means we may be surprised to learn valuable information about A. But my initial reaction is that such sessions aren’t necessary until preschool. We get an information download every day when we pick her up including a written report that chronicles everything (yes, that stuff, too). Despite my skepticism, I wonder how we can seize the opportunity to actually make this a meaningful session. Thoughts?

4 Responses

My first thought about the conference is to wonder about the level of education of the provider to really be able to give more info on a milestone type of status. It sounds as though the center or placement has their act together,which isn’t always the case, so it will be worth going and help you to get a better picture than you already have of where your little one is spending her time and how. As to spinach,try the frozen too-supposedly it retains more vitamins and nutrients than the canned. You can add it to some ground turkey for an enriched burger or meatball, making it more palatable for those picky eaters you may know.

I think I commented before that we too had to wait a little while to introduce milk after a diaper rash the first go around. We tried at 12 months but he developed a really nasty diaper rash. He was born a month early so I don’t think he was ready for it then. We waited another month and did the gradual introduction of milk to a bottle as you did and it worked well. Our son had picked up on the straw sippy cups around 9 months old. He would get 1 bottle in the morning of milk and everything else for the rest of the day came from the sippy cup. We cut out the bottle a little late because our second son was born and we didn’t want to make big changes until our oldest had acclimated to the new little one. eventually I just started giving warm milk in the sippy cup in the morning instead of a bottle and once that was OK we started to gradually decrease the temp of the milk.

We put the good stuff (apple juice, honey & tea, etc) in the sippy, but gave her a bottle of milk. she figured out the sippy, but didn’t want it, so we just let it go for a couple of months. Then one day, she grabbed the sippy, ditched the bottle and never went back. The difficult part I thought was deciding which type of sippy to embrace…

Our daycare doesn’t have parent-teacher conferences, but I would recommend asking hte teacher what they are expecting out of this meeting. It might be more an opportunity for the teachers to get to know the parents and talk plans like potty, bottle, snack, playground, etc.

We go to the same daycare as you so I hope you ended up finding the conferences useful. I had the same reaction initially but what I have found them useful for is more one on one time with the teachers – talking a bit more about some of the behaviors we observe in our “A” at home and whether they see them there – it really is amazing as they get older how they may have things that they do with no complaint at all there but you would think it was a totally new experience when it’s at home. Now that we just had our third of these, I was better prepared going into it with a list of questions about milestones and questions that I always mean to ask on a day to day basis but get lost in the craze of pick up (do you make them take the legos apart before they go back in the bucket or is my daughter really just that OCD???)